The scale of CERB - 8.5 million recipients - and its speed of implementation has changed the debate about Basic Income and/vs EI. The Liberal-NDP bloc, backed up by sections of labour, have embraced BI as a technocratic renovation aimed at reforging a broad popular base.

Critiques of BI as a neoliberal trojan horse are powerful, especially when/if essential expenses are subordinated to fully marketized prices. But with BI now on the horizon with the NDP and labour as partners, such critiques are useless with no oppositional powerbase or strategy.

Apologies - this thread was cut short due to a bad connection. Continues below.

Taking the trojan horse threat seriously, we must dig in around housing, transit, healthcare, food, social services, etc, build defensive positions, but also prepare for a counterattack to scrap fees, decommodify resources, and win price controls.

Put another way, containing and rolling back the marketization, privatization, commodification of essential services and expenses will be necessary to resist BI as a neoliberal threat (as Milton Friedman and his followers conceived it).

Furthermore, govt talk of intro'ing BI after CERB's popularity may raise popular expectations and bury the miserable labour and left failures around EI reform. For the time being, it is a terrain favourable to the left in advancing universal access over means-testing.

As for workers' power, workplace activists are well situated to build new campaigns to eliminate any BI disqualification penalty with CERB/EI for quitting jobs "voluntarily" during the deadly panic. We may not win this, but it can/will develop and train new worker activists.

The short version is BI looks to be coming in some form, and its left critics (including me) have lost the argument. But we have some time to prepare for a neoliberal trojan horse, and build up new workplace orgs and activists to fight against means-testing BI/EI.

Let's go.